Experimental study demonstrates collective blinking in single lanthanide-doped upconversion nanocrystals, highlighting opportunities for ultra-stable super-resolution microscopy.
Key Points
To identify, characterize, and control collective luminescence blinking in multi-ion lanthanide-doped upconversion nanocrystals for high-contrast, background-free super-resolution imaging.
Synthesized and optically analyzed single lanthanide-doped upconversion nanocrystals under tunable excitation power regimes.
Evaluated blinking kinetics, on–off intensity contrast ratios, and long-term photostability over thousands of continuous switching cycles.
Implemented low-power super-resolution localization microscopy on dense nanocrystal aggregates based on collective blinking dynamics.
Nanocrystals exhibited collective blinking with an on–off intensity ratio up to 25 and maintained continuous switching for over 15 hours (exceeding 10,000 cycles) without discernible photodegradation.
Revealed an activator-independent mechanism where a single quencher intercepts delocalized excitation energy across the Yb3+ sensitizer network to darken the entire multi-ion nanocrystal.
Achieved super-resolution localization microscopy resolving individual nanocrystals in dense aggregates with a mean resolution of 12.6 nm and a mean localization precision of 1.2 nm.